I'm Not Me
by InTheEyesOfTheUnseenOne
Summary: Cerberus needed Shepard, and they were willing to try anything to get him back. Cloning was tried, but deemed a failure. This is the story of one such failure.


**Note: First time trying this style, so please bare with me. The idea of cloning Shepard really intrigued me. So I made this little story about a failed clone experiment. If it gets some positive feedback, I will continue, but if not this has been really fun one shot.**

* * *

"Shepard?"

The clearly feminine whisper is clipped and professional, sharply restrained, yet laced with indistinct obscurity, drifting uncertainly through the stale air of the cloning facility before collapsing back into dead silence.

"Shepard?"

Again, this time louder.

My eyelids peel back slowly, my vision dull and watery, clouded with the last remnants of sleep. I feel my lungs expanding and contracting on their own accord, drawing in oxygen through the various white tubes connected to the vat which imprisons me. I breathe hard without opening my mouth or inhaling through my nose, the machines ahve already detected the increase in the speed of my heart rate, and they're adjusting accordingly. Oxygen pumps automatically through my bloodstream.

The hollow echoes of the woman's voice lurch down the long corridor of the cloning vats and tumble down the hallway.

_Shepard...? Shepard...?_

Experimentally, I twitch my fingers- out and in, out and in. I pinch myself on the wrist. It hurts, and the sharp pinprick of pain must mean i'm awake.

I haven't decided yet whether or not that's a good thing.

The panicked woman's voice rises to a near-shout. "Shepard, can you hear me!?"

Some stifled urge to answer her rises up in my chest. I involuntarily open my mute mouth to form words, my lips parting, a syllable beginning to emerge, but the sound is suffocated by the liquid all around me. The liquid scalds my open mouth raw, and I convulse, a stream of strangled bubbles pushing out of my chest. Hollow gasps emerge hoarsely

from my numb throat. I raise my hands, clenching them into fists, and pound the glass with my pale knuckles until the bones sting dully with pain.

"JOHN!"

The voice is urgent now, fear poisoning the question with tremulous doubt.

I beat through the liquid with my arms, swimming up to the ceiling of my cylindrical prison. Half-insane now, craving some unseen and unknown memory,I cut through the liquidseamlessly, my heart banging against my ribcage.I bash my skull blindly against the transparisteel. Pain shoots across my vision, a flash of white light and my answering howl of animal rage is swallowed whole by the liquid.

"Shepard," the woman cries, her voice bordering on a shriek now. "Please," Sshe pleads. Her voice breaks, and I can har it all welling up to the surface now, the bitter anguish of a ttorn heart.

"Please, Shepard, listen to me. You have to listen to me!"

I feel the weight of gravity suck me angrily down to collide with the floor of my prison. Torrents of bubbles blind my eyes, my vision rippling indistinctly.

"Shepard, they're lying to you. They're all lying to you. They want to use you...You can't listen to them, you have to get away!"

_Shepard? _The name echoes and sings with repercussions of a life forgotten. _Shepard..._

John Shepard.

Son.

Colonist.

Orphan.

Marine.

Spectre.

Hero.

_Dead..._

I'm not John Shepard.

Who am I?

I'm a number. Experiment 1576. Clone project. Grown in a vat. Born to resurrect a dead man.

"It's all _LIES_!" the woman's voice distantly exclaims, desperation threatening to overwhelm her. "Come back to yourself. Come back to me, back to _us._ I love you...don't let them do this! Don't let me lose you, Shepard!"

Shepard. _John Shepard..._

I'm not John.

But I remember-

i remember John.

I remember feeling John Shepard die.

I remember the searing agony of the pressure of space, the burning of flesh and muscle and the agony of bones crushing. I remember the blast of energy as his body fell into the atmosphere. I remember falling like as a shooting star toward the ground.

Scarlet fire, burning agonizingly through the layers of my armor, my flesh, my muscles, my ribs, my lungs...

_Why?_

Answer me mindless fate!

_Why? How?_

Who am I, I alone, unbound, unchained, without the echoes of a dead man's memories.

_Shepard._

That is the name the father I never knew whispered, a rueful murmur piercing through the fragments of bleeding memories.

Shepard.

John Shepard.

And I feel it all now, the person I was meant to be, the person I could have been, the person my friends believed I was, the person I thought I was, the person _she_ believed I could be, the person i'm not.

I'm screaming through the liquid, but I can't make a sound. I'm banging the container with shrieking anger in every blow, but it makes no difference, my heart clenches like a fist, and I can't breathe. I want to drown these images, these voices, these endless portraits of conflicting identities, never me...never _me..._

I'm not me.

I'm not _Shepard!_

"Shepard?" the woman calls, as if from miles and miles away. "Shepard...?"

And I know who the woman is.

Liara.

Liara T'soni.

And I'm out on a landing ramp, Liara's hands suddenly clutching me with urgent passion, her lips moving with mine, my lips moving against them, my fingers moving up to gently against her tendrils, her cool breath on my face...

"Goodbye, Liara."

And then I'm falling...

_Shepard,_ I correct myself. Shepard kissed her. Shepard loved her. Shepard fell away into space, torn away from her. But as for me...

I'm not Shepard.

I'm not anyone.

I close my burning eyes, but darkness is a shroud over my soul, and I toss and turn in emptiness.

...Then I open my eyes.

My head stings. The only light comes in pale, filtered shafts that fall evenly around the darkness of the dirty room I inhabit.

After a second, I realize my throat is on fire, and I get up to go get a glass of water.

...A woman.

Why do I always hear a woman's voice when I try to sleep?


End file.
